I’ve had my D600 for about 8 or 9 months now and until recently I thought I had gotten lucky and that my camera wasn’t going to have the dust or oil problem. But after shooting about more than a 3000 frames in the past 10 days, I had a chance to finally view my images on a desktop monitor and I’m horrified. I’ve been infected with the dreaded D600 dust problem.

Some would say it’s just dust and you can blow it out – that’s true, but when you spend over $2k on a piece of equipment you expect these sort of issues to be resolved (with a recall) or at the least acknowledged by a Nikon. Instead they’ve tried to pull the wool over our eyes and released the D610, which from the specs is just the D600 with the dust issue fixed and some very minor tweaks that can be hyped up for marketing.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my D600, it’s a fantastic all around camera. I’ve shot landscapes, wildlife, sports, wedding, and more with it and it’s never let me down. My gripe is with Nikon – man up, say you’re sorry and fix the issue. Reading the online forms, many are suspecting an issue with the seal around the shutter release. This makes sense since the dust is predominant only on the top-left hand corner of the sensor. After this weekends’ sports shoot, I’m going to send it in for servicing. More on that once I’ve gone through that process.

In the meantime, here are some shots after doing A LOT of cloning with the spot removal tool.

D600 Dust Problem – Example of dust on the sensor and spot removal to clone them out

From reading some online forums, Nikon replaced a certain part if you send the unit in, but not for everyone. Worth a try for me, and if anything get worse down the road, I have proof that it was looked at by an official service centre.